Parents, if your house is for sale, PLEASE remove any and all references to specific information regarding your children. This may include name banners, awards, certificates, report cards, signs, etc. Don't give Mayhem a chance with with your children!

Danger

Real Estate Agents: Please encourage your listing clients to remove name signs such as the one above. While charming, they could put a child at risk. If the client won't comply, refrain from posting such photos.

This is one important piece of advice I give all my Connecticut Home Staging clients, and one that I would think all agents would too. However, every day I see new listings posted on the MLS with this kind of blatant "invitation". Let's keep the children's safety in mind!

12/30/2011

If you’re like me, you run to Google for just about everything - especially amateur medical diagnoses and amateur background checks. But Googling your address should definitely go on the list, especially if it’s an address you’re thinking of buying, renting or owning. A simple Google search can show you everything from local crime information to recent sales comps in your area (which may help you lower your property taxes) to your home’s basic property records.

There are at least six compelling reasons it makes sense to do so, though -- especially if it's an address you're thinking of renting, buying or selling. Smart homeowners would do well to search for their addresses, too, and here's why:

#1. To See If Megan's Law Registrants Live Nearby
Safety first, folks. Megan's law requires law-enforcement authorities to make information available to the public regarding registered sex offenders in their neighborhoods. Nearly every state that has a Megan's law-type sex offender registry has an online version that serves up the names, addresses, sex-offense history, and even photos in many cases, of convicted sex offenders who are registered as living at a certain address. Googling your address and "Megan's law" -- or even your city or zip code and "Megan's law" -- will turn up a quick list of nearby registrants. Alarmism is not a good look -- ever, but many homebuyers with young children highly value this information, especially while they are still in their contingency or objection period, before their home purchase is finalized.

#2. To Find Crime Reports and Data for Your Home and Environs

Cities, counties and state law enforcement agencies all post crime data online, but a Google search for your address or city and "crime reports" is most likely to turn up your local police or sheriff's office's crime map. Or, you can check out the crime stats around a specific property on Trulia’s Map & Nearby tab on the detailed page for your home's address. In my town, for example, you can see a crime map of recent incident reports for the whole city, by zip code, by neighborhood or by address. You can zoom in and out, and the map is in color and letter-coded with little icons representing different types of crimes: red is for violent, blue is for drug crimes, green is for property crimes; and the most common specific offenses reported get their own two-letter code. Whether you own or rent your home, if you hear a siren and wonder what happened, Google might be a good place to look.

This is also a good strategy for home buyers to leverage. In fact, when new homeowners Robert Quigley and Jennifer Friberg started developing headaches and other strange physical symptoms after moving into their first home, a neighbor dropped the informational bomb that the home's previous resident had been cooking methamphetamine in the home. In a panicky effort to suss out the truth, they Googled their address and - yikes! - found it listed on the Drug Enforcement Administration's database of meth labs! If you're considering buying a home, or moving to a neighborhood with which you are not completely familiar, doing a quick address search on Trulia or Google holds the potential to reveal some disturbing or comforting crime activity information.

#3. To Detect Scammers Trying to Rent or Sell Your House. In one of those if-only-they-would-use-their-powers-for-good-not-evil scenarios, Internet scammers have taken to ripping off home information and putting together fake listings offering other people's homes for rent or, often, lease-to-own. They often list the home on extremely cheap and easy terms, then ask the would-be-buyer or tenant to please wire or send the deposit money overseas, where the faux-seller can get it while they're traveling in -- you guessed it -- Nigeria. (And, BTW, I have friends from Nigeria who even distrust emails they get purporting to be from Nigeria!)

These scams come to light, most often, only after the homeowner or current resident notices all the bargain-hunting wanna-be tenants start peering in the windows and tramping through the backyard, checking the place out. If you are getting an inordinate amount of street or foot traffic to your home, or someone knocks on the door asking if they can see the place, you may want to Google your address. If you find a fraudulent listing, contact us, identify yourself as the home's rightful resident and ask us to take the scam posting down - stat!

# 4. To See What Your Neighbor's Place Sold for and Possibly Lower Your Property Taxes. In real estate, the value of your home is largely driven by what similar, nearby homes have recently sold for ("comparable sales," or "comps" for short). That gives every homeowner a valid reason for wanting to know what the neighbor's place sold for (on top of your purely voyeuristic need to know). If you search your address, Trulia will first surface some sort of image of your home, a map, the basic property details from the public records (see No. 5, below), and recent sales data for your own home before listing out the comps -- homes with similar numbers of bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet as yours, near yours, and what they recently sold for. Googling your address, in this instance, does double duty -- letting you satisfy your cat-killing curiosity to know what your new neighbor paid for their place, and track the value of your own home at the same time!

And as an added bonus, if you see a pattern of homes selling for lower than your home's assessed value, you can use those comps to petition your County to lower your own property taxes!

Three birds, one stone - you get the picture.

#5. To See Your Home's Property Records. It's a story as old as homes -- well, at least as old as websites that display home records and listings. Your home's records online are populated from the public records about your home, which are either so old they don't include the upgrades and additions that have been done over time, or they're just flat out wrong for a number of reasons. My last home, while large, certainly did not have the 25 bedrooms one site listed it as having. On the other hand, it also was not a boarding house, which is what that site listed as the property's County-designated use. If you Google your address, or search for it on Trulia, and find that your home's description is riddled with errors, contact us or your County public record agency to correct them; this is particularly important if you're planning to sell your home anytime soon.

#6. To See Your Home's Google Street Views. When you're selling your home, it's especially critical to see everything that prospective home buyers will see. That means checking out how your home's listing looks on all the online real estate sites (yes, even on Trulia), checking out the flier - even stopping by to check out any staging your broker or agent did if you've already moved out. One thing even most savvy sellers don't check out is the way Google Maps Street Views depicts your home. If you're unfamiliar, Google actually hitches up cameras to cars and sends them up and down public streets worldwide, so that Google Maps users can go from an overhead view of a street via satellite to seeing panoramic pics from the street from curb level with one click.

Trust me, home buyers know this, and do this. They often use Street Views as a shortcut for seeing whether a home's photos are just fuzzy, or whether it's next door to the local hoarder's house. Here's the problem: Sometimes, the street views can be outdated. I did a major remodel on my home a few years ago, and the photo was clearly taken mid-construction: with dumpster in front, unpainted siding and all. If you're about to sell your home, and you notice that the street view is outdated, mention it to your agent, and ask them to make a note of that fact in the listing information.

12/08/2011

The Treasury Department announced it will withhold Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) payments from JPMorgan because they found they are not doing enough to help homeowners permanently lower their mortgages through loan modifications.Treasury Criticizes JPMorgan Chase Over Mortgage Services

HAMP was introduced in 2009 as a way to help homeowners lower their monthly mortgage payments. The program requires mortgage servicers like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and others to contact homeowners effectively and offer assistance in reducing their mortgage payments through loan modification programs. HAMP offers incentive payments to servicers to rewrite loan terms for distressed homeowners.

The Treasury found for the third straight quarter that JPMorgan Chase needed “substantial improvement” in their efforts to help homeowners stay in their homes. Bank of America was found to have made some progress, but still needed to do more to help homeowners avoid foreclosure.

12/06/2011

If you want to understand why the Occupy movement has found such traction, it helps to listen to a former banker like James Theckston. He fully acknowledges that he and other bankers are mostly responsible for the country’s housing mess.
Damon Winter/The New York Times

Nicholas D. Kristof
On the Ground

As a regional vice president for Chase Home Finance in southern Florida, Theckston shoveled money at home borrowers. In 2007, his team wrote $2 billion in mortgages, he says. Sometimes those were “no documentation” mortgages.

“On the application, you don’t put down a job; you don’t show income; you don’t show assets,” he said. “But you still got a nod.”

“If you had some old bag lady walking down the street and she had a decent credit score, she got a loan,” he added.

Theckston says that borrowers made harebrained decisions and exaggerated their resources but that bankers were far more culpable — and that all this was driven by pressure from the top.

“You’ve got somebody making $20,000 buying a $500,000 home, thinking that she’d flip it,” he said. “That was crazy, but the banks put programs together to make those kinds of loans.”

Especially when mortgages were securitized and sold off to investors, he said, senior bankers turned a blind eye to shortcuts.

“The bigwigs of the corporations knew this, but they figured we’re going to make billions out of it, so who cares? The government is going to bail us out. And the problem loans will be out of here, maybe even overseas.”

One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.

These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.

Theckston, who has a shelf full of awards that he won from Chase, such as “sales manager of the year,” showed me his 2006 performance review. It indicates that 60 percent of his evaluation depended on him increasing high-risk loans.

In late 2008, when the mortgage market collapsed, Theckston and most of his colleagues were laid off. He says he bears no animus toward Chase, but he does think it is profoundly unfair that troubled banks have been rescued while troubled homeowners have been evicted.

When I called JPMorgan Chase for its side of the story, it didn’t deny the accounts of manic mortgage-writing. Its spokesmen acknowledge that banks had made huge mistakes and noted that Chase no longer writes subprime or no-document mortgages. It also said that it has offered homeowners four times as many mortgage modifications as homes it has foreclosed on.

Still, 28 percent of all American mortgages are “underwater,” according to Zillow, a real estate Web site. That means that more is owed than the home is worth, and the figure is up from 23 percent a year ago. That overhang stifles the economy, for it’s difficult to nurture a broad recovery unless real estate and construction revive.

All this came into sharper focus this week as Bloomberg Markets magazine published a terrific exposé based on lending records it pried out of the Federal Reserve in a lawsuit. It turns out that the Fed provided an astonishing sum to keep banks afloat — $7.8 trillion, equivalent to more than $25,000 per American.

The article estimated that banks earned up to $13 billion in profits by relending that money to businesses and consumers at higher rates.

The Federal Reserve action isn’t a scandal, and arguably it’s a triumph. The Fed did everything imaginable to avert a financial catastrophe — and succeeded. The money was repaid.

Yet what is scandalous is the basic unfairness of what has transpired. The federal government rescued highly paid bankers from their reckless decisions. It protected bank shareholders and creditors. But it mostly turned a cold shoulder to some of the most vulnerable and least sophisticated people in America. Last year alone, banks seized more than one million homes.

Sure, some programs exist to help borrowers in trouble, but not nearly enough. We still haven’t taken such basic steps as allowing bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of a mortgage on a primary home. Legislation to address that has gotten nowhere.

My daughter and I are reading Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” aloud to each other, and those Depression-era injustices seem so familiar today. That’s why the Occupy movement resonates so deeply: When the federal government goes all-out to rescue errant bankers, and stiffs homeowners, that’s not just bad economics. It’s also wrong.

11/22/2011

Bank of America completed nearly 100,000 short sales in 2010—more than double the previous year. In addition, BofA has consistently completed more short sales than REO sales every month for the last 18 months. It’s a trend to keep an eye on, to be sure, as short sales will be of far more benefit to the housing market as a whole than REO (in terms of property values, homes on market, vacant/eyesore properties, etc.)

As an example, in May, the mega bank completed 2,000 more short sales than REO (9,000 to 7,000 respectively). BofA and, no doubt, most of the other large banks, are finding it easier to close short sale transactions thanks to the Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternative (HAFA) program, which streamlines gathering the required documentation and reduces the total time spent on short sales.

"HAFA is dead on. It's a lot easier to qualify now for HAFA than it was in 2010. All I need is a hardship affidavit and one water bill. We're trying to make it as easy as possible," said David Sunlin, Bank of America’s real estate management executive.

10/28/2011

Sounds far-fetched, I know, but then these social media sites are always evolving. It also seems there's a shocking case of this already happening to a homeowner in Australia!

A couple living in Australia defaulted on their loan and could not be located by physical address or email. So the lender's attorneys got creative and located them on Facebook. They verified the couple's identities by matching their names, birthdays, and the fact they'd connected with each other on the site. So the homeowners were sent a foreclosure notice via Facebook.

How embarrassing! Especially if it ever ended up in the public area of one's Facebook page! Perhaps even more amazing is that the Australian courts actually upheld the lender's right to send foreclosure notices through Facebook. The court pointed out the fact that the couple had not enabled privacy protections on their Facebook accounts and that they visited the site frequently enough to "reasonably receive notice as a result."

Legal experts believe it is just a matter of time before lenders earn the right to serve foreclosure documents through social networks like Facebook. You might want to change those privacy settings on Facebook now to avoid issues of this or any other legal kind in the future on your Facebook page!

10/06/2011

08/25/2011

The California Association of Realtors Wednesday delivered a public reprimand to the nation’s top mortgage lenders and servicers over their handling of short sales.

In letters to JPMorgan Chase (JPM: 35.59 -0.67%), Citigroup (C: 29.01 +1.97%), Bank of America (BAC: 7.5411 +7.88%) and Wells Fargo (WFC: 24.4373 +0.03%), the association charges the lenders with failing to respond to borrowers’ short-sale requests within a reasonable time frame, dragging their feet on processing files and miring incomplete files in excessive red tape, among other things.

"As public attention continues to be focused on the real estate industry in hopes of signs of a housing recovery, we trust you’ll agree that change in your short-sale process is critical," said CAR President Beth Peerce in the letter. The association said the communiqué is a response to increasing difficulty among real estate agents in closing short sales, which it says will be a part of the California real estate landscape for years to come.

The letter outlines a series of recommendations for actions lenders should undertake to allow short sales to run more smoothly and aid in the housing market recovery.

"We believe banks, investors, homeowners and real estate professionals all have a common interest in conducting these transactions expeditiously and efficiently," said Peerce in her communication to lenders. "The housing market recovery is in everyone’s best interests, and your urgent focus on these issues will help achieve that end."

JP Morgan spokesman countered that the bank is now processing 5,000 short sales a month. "That is a significant amount," the source tells HousingWire. "We know that short sales are important to the market and that is why we are doing so many."

Citigroup also pointed out that it has had a specialized short sales group for a number of years. "In 2009 senior management increased our focus on potential short sales, recognizing that they may be the best solution for some borrowers," said spokesman Mark Rodgers. "The unit employs short sales specialists who are able to expedite the short sales process."

08/24/2011

Mortgage servicers contending with attorney general investigations and extended foreclosure delays turned more to short sales in the past year.

In August 2009, short sales accounted for 8% of all liquidations of distressed properties. That number grew to 25% by the middle of 2011, according to research from Moody's Investors Service.

Meanwhile, the time it took from a borrower default to eventual REO liquidation grew from an average 14 months in early 2009 to 24 months by the summer of 2011.

The delays pushed the timelines out and as a result, losses on the eventual sale of those properties higher. Servicers had to halt the foreclosure process in October 2010 to correct forged documents and mishandled foreclosures as part of the robo-signing scandal. Since then, new regulations from federal agencies and still ongoing negotiations between the state AGs left servicers turning toward an early sale of the property before a filing a foreclosure.

"To reduce their expenses and mitigate the high loss severity on liquidated loans, servicers are increasingly opting to bypass the foreclosure process and liquidate properties more quickly through a short sale," Moody's analysts said.

Researchers at Deutsche Bank said servicers are using the transactions to also cut into the shadow inventory of properties stuck somewhere in the foreclosure process. Standard & Poor's said the market actually cut into the shadow inventory during the second quarter for the first time since 2009.

Deutsche Bank found short sales actually take less time to complete than REO sales because of the documentation problems.

The average REO took 17 months to sell in the middle of 2011, compared to just under 12 months for short sales completed in that time, according to Deutsche Bank.

Loss severities dropped as well. Servicers experienced a 70% loss rate on REOs sold in the middle of 2011, compared to less than 60% for short sales.

These transactions also do less damage to a borrower's credit score, dropping it between 50 and 200 points compared to an REO sale, which can slash the FICO score for the borrower as much as 400 points.

Borrowers who manage a short sale can buy a new home between one and two years as well, according to researchers. Those whose homes sell through REO must wait between five and seven.

However, short sales continue to be a struggle as investors often squabble over whether or not to approve the transaction.

"Short sales, like other servicer loss mitigation strategies, may stir a fierce 'class warfare' between investors in different parts of the deal capital structure," Deutsche Bank researchers said.

Moody's analysts said short sales steadied loss severities over the past year, as foreclosure problems continue to plague the recovery.

"We can attribute the stabilization of average loss severities in part to a rising number of liquidations through short sale, which by reducing liquidation timelines, foreclosure expenses, and legal costs, can reduce the losses incurred on defaulted loans," Moody's said.